We’ve made it to Poland, now let’s just hope we make it out of the other side – people were right, the driving here is beyond nuts. I don’t know what they are teaching learner drivers out here but I imagine it’s something along the lines of ‘under no circumstances should you ever spend longer than 30 seconds stuck behind another driver and if you’re planning to overtake, try and do it in the most dangerous place you can find, a blind hill is always a good bet’. Needless to say we’ve been taking it rather slowly but on Saturday 6th of Aug we made it all the way to Malbork.
Our day started with XL coffees since we’d had a rubbish nights sleep (too hot and too noisy) which turned out to be a bad idea a few hours later when the caffeine comedown kicked in but while we were still hyped up on service station coffee we went to explore The Wolf’s Lair.
The Wolf’s Lair is just outside the town of Ketzryn and was Adolf Hitlers main military stronghold on the eastern front back when it was Prussia and it’s where an assassination attempt on Hitlers life took place. The Nazis attempted to blow the place up before the allies got to it but only half succeeded so it’s a collection of creepy, concrete (of course) bunkers in various states of decay in the middle of a woodland. Perfect place to film a horror movie.
We decided to explore alone rather than buy a guided tour and it’s a good job we took a photo of the map at the entrance ‘cos it’s not signposted at all and it’s pretty easy to get mixed up on the woodland trails between bunkers.
We saw Hitlers Bunker, the sauna (?!), the ‘kasino’ and the garages amongst other things, we could hardly believe how busy it was here!
The heath and safety levels were a bit different to ours in England – each bunker had warning signs spray painted on the outside telling people not to go in (to be fair some of them were being held up with sticks so i’m guessing they’re not overly safe) but even the official tour guides were ignoring them – there was one with barbed wire around it so I’m guessing that one is super dangerous.
There was even the change to practice your target shooting and buy some military souvenirs in one of the bunkers – the whole place had quite an odd feel – part way between an amusement park and a museum of horrors.
The heavens opened around lunch time so we had a bite to eat and headed to the city of Malbork – i’ll just take a minute here to say how amazingly cheap it is here! We got a full shop including a bottle of prosecco for under £10, we could live like kings here!
We went to Malbork to see the castle which is the world’s largest with regards to surface area and it is pretty impressive, it’s been nearly completely rebuilt after WW2. There’s a huge tourist carpark just at the foot of the castle grounds but our clever satnav took us the wrong way and we ended up on a council estate BUT it worked in our favour for once as we happened to drive into a free carpark about 5m from the paid one and we even managed to stay there overnight.
We didn’t pay to get into the castle itself but you can get into the grounds and see the court yard where they had some stalls selling the usual tat which every kid under 10 was begging their parents to buy and the view from the river was lovely. On the way out the next day we drove past an official motorhome stopover on the other side of the castle and felt very smug that we’d bagged yet another free night!
tiny van adventures 